Hijacked by a Hair Commercial

I typically don't watch videos on Facebook (too slow to surf) but there is no avoiding the My Choice video featuring Deepika Paukone by Vogue India. So I did and my first reaction was - good thing!

Wait wait wait .. I just saw the pretty face and who can disagree with a women's empowerment message? I like it I said to myself and moved on.

But something nagged - a voice in the back of my head asked -am I being manipulated? How do I show that I chose? By flapping my hair and showing a sexy body?

How do I learn to be strong? How do I learn not be a victim? How do I have the courage to leave home if forced into marrying a man 3 times my age?

Sure it is my choice not to have acid dropped on my face - but how do I enforce the choice?

Have better hair? Be more glamorous? Choose to hurt people by loving them and leaving them?

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" somebody said (Pete Townsend?) and sure I am free to choose - responsibly - unless I have nothing left to lose.

But I do - I am woman yes. I am mother, wife, employer,employee, social activist and a great supported of women in technical professions. Does this video want to mold me into an image I find limiting?

Personally I like the story of the woman who gave her groom a math test at the altar and when he flunked simple addition she chose to stand up and walk away. I would share that video.

Normally I don't nit-pick but I just want to put it out there - Women's empowerment is much too important a topic to be hijacked by hair.

Women Creating Jobs, for Themselves and Others

3,818 jobs. That's right - that's the number of jobs created by entrepreneurs who graduated in 2010 from the Women's Initiative for Self Employment curriculum in the bay area. Women's Initiative, a non-profit, provides low-income, high-potential women with the training, funding and ongoing support to start their own businesses and become financially self-sufficient.  The women who go through the program significantly increase their income and assets while launching businesses, creating jobs and stimulating the local economy. The stories of Laura Leon and Reign Free I heard at the 2011 Gala as guest of HP Social Innovation, energised and helped celebrate the spirit of women leadership. It was also great to see how the Women's Initiative organisation has grown and is able to empower women to become income providers instead of charity seekers. What I find distinguishes Women's Initiative from others is that they provide a full service - which includes not just the initial training but also start-up funding and then helps them build connections (they call the 3 steps Train, Fund, Propel) thus creating a larger support system for its graduates that increases chances of success. Appropriately, reflecting this philosophy the 2011 Gala was called "Connecting Women on the Rise".
Get connected. Get Inspired.

Leadership Skill for Social Entrepreneurs

The leadership definition I like is from Charlie Pellerin, former Dir Astrophysics at NASA: “Leadership is influencing people to do willingly, and do well, that which has to be done.”
Doesn't that sound like what social entrepreneurs have to do?

On August 2, I had the opportunity to moderate a professional development workshop hosted by IWE and sponsored by Fujitsu called "Cultivating Influence: How to Influence and Deliver Results". The tech-savvy panel covered a range of expertise - large corporation (Nina Bhatti - HP, Peggy Zagelow - IBM), triple-bottom-line startup Meemli (Usha Sekar) and entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship and MicroPlace (Ashwini Narayanan). The panel was followed by a interactive skills building experience session led by Improv artist Susan Snyder of BATS. Some highlights:

There is no right way, nor is there only one way to influence others. Everything is a factor when influencing people. And we are, all of us, influenced by organizations, actions, people, places, events and situations at all times. Sometimes we are affected more or less by these things, but we are continually being influenced by what happens around us. So what about the specifics in the workplace?
Your job requires you to influence people just about all of the time. It may take the form of gaining support, inspiring others, persuading other people to become your champions, engaging someone's imagination, creating relationships. Whatever form it takes, being an excellent influencer makes your job easier.

* think win-win - articulate the benefit for organisation, individual, group
* self-empowerment: be self-aware; take responsibility for managing the perception people have of you - e.g. stop acting "fresh-off-the-boat"; build your "new" sphere of influence
* manage your career; manage your boss - build trust but don't be a threat to him/her
* lead by involving others in problem solving by posing the problems and asking "how"
* Make coworkers feel positive, can do empowered (e.g. through use of positive attributes as nicknames)
* make it "their" idea
* Make an abstract concept personal
* Power of education -to make a change in a belief system provide education/information
* Reposition points of view - e.g. microfinance is not a "handout" but a "hand up"
* Compliance - make others to "feel good" like a superhero especially if doing something difficult/different for them
* Create websites/images to convey "higher purpose" to get alignment
* Negotiate the detail only after "shared goal" has been established first
* think positive and use positive language - ex. organisational understanding - vs. "politics"
* Do uncover the problems but always from a "what could be a solution" attitude without blame

An interesting point about people, who use their influencing skills well, is that other people like being around them. There's a kind of exciting buzz, or sense that things happen when they're around.

Check out Peggy's blog on the subject for a personal account of the workshop.

Business School with a difference

The Maan Deshi Udyogini Business School for rural women, founded by economist and farmer Chetna Gala Sinha last December, is gradually becoming a symbol of empowerment for women at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Situated in the dry region enveloping Mhaswad and Vaduj villages, 270 miles (430 kilometers) from Mumbai, the school is targeted at school dropouts and women without formal education. Today the school offers 19 skill-development courses, including computer training, bag making, English-language training, and financial literacy instruction.
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jul2007/bs20070716_428181.htm
And the cost is not the thousands of dollars that a standard B-School charges- but the equivalent of $2.50 for the entire course.
- from netika